


Et exaltavit humiles

by nnozomi



Series: orchestra'verse [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Classical Music, Education, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 05:20:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15212075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: An unexpected act of violence sets a great many things in motion; administration changes the world.





	Et exaltavit humiles

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the orchestra’verse series, set concurrently with the fall term of Hermione and company’s seventh year.  
> This is as close as I get to pure idfic: made from, not with, in the words of Death Bredon. You have been warned.

Foolishly enough, the first coherent sentence that came into Percy’s head when it was over was― _But I’m not even responsible for hiring._

His head hurt, although he didn’t think any of the kicks had landed there. One side of his jaw ached; it seemed too much trouble to try and figure out if he had loose teeth. His back and sides must be dappled with boot-marks. Everything from his left shoulder down to his fingertips was undiscovered country, a great blank void from which, if he once broke through into the pain there, he might indeed not return.

Passing out seemed like the best option all around, he thought. If they had meant to kill him, they would have done it already. The night wasn’t cold. It wasn’t even a particularly deserted alley; someone would find him soon enough.

When he tried to move his left shoulder, passing out on command turned out to be the easiest thing he’d ever done.

 He was right, of course; the lady opening her dairy first thing in the morning came across him, and after that it was all DMLE and St. Mungo’s and, inevitably, parents. The hardest thing in the whole day, much worse than the interview with the Auror or even having the dislocated shoulder put back in, was trying to convince his mother that no, he really didn’t need to go back to the Burrow with her that night, he would be _fine_ in his own little flat. In the end, his father gave him a significant look and he gave up and went.

Unexpectedly, once his mother had finally settled down enough to leave him alone in his room, it was quiet. He hadn’t ever imagined that home could be empty and quiet. Bill was still off in Egypt, and Charlie in Romania. The twins had found an extremely disreputable basement flat somewhere off the Alley, of which they had devoted almost all the square footage to experimental charm space. And Ron and Ginny, of course, were at school.

Percy let himself carefully down on the narrow bed with its rather too squishy mattress. The St. Mungo’s healer had seen to his various bruises in no time―a simple _Episki_ would do that―and fixed his shoulder, although with a warning that it had been dislocated long enough that the swelling and soreness would take time to recede.

There was still almost no feeling in his left hand. “That’s a curse, that is,” the healer had said gloomily. “Most of the rest of what you’ve got is good old-fashioned assault and battery, Muggle-style, take no time to fix, but that’s a bit of a nasty one. Not something I’ve seen before. Are you right-handed? Good. I’ve bandaged it with numbing cloths for now, and you’re to let us know how you get on as the spell on the bandages wears off.”

Percy had said he would, not much inclined to care for the moment at hand―as it were, his mind registered vaguely. That had been the short one at the side, he remembered uneasily, grabbing his wrist as the tallest one swung him off balance and gabbling a spell he hadn’t recognized―it was at that point when the competing forces of magic and physics knocked him off his feet, and he hadn’t managed to think about anything else for a while but the pain in his shoulder.

Well, come what may. The spell was cast now, and whatever it had been it wasn’t apparently subject to a simple _finite_. At least, as the healer had confirmed, he was right-handed. It was hard to feel strongly about the question at the moment.

 

He was back at work and in his own flat two days later, because the alternative was screaming. “But you need to rest, your poor hand’s still bad, you won’t be able to look after yourself, you shouldn’t be putting yourself under pressure—“ his mother protested, jointly and severally.

“He’ll feel better when he can get back to his usual routines,” Arthur Weasley had finally put in. “Don’t worry, Moll. Laura Raeburn’s a good sort, she won’t let him overwork himself, but he needs to be back in the office for his own sake.”

Molly began another protest, and Arthur said something too quietly for Percy to hear, finishing in more normal tones with “…and how soon were you back in the kitchen then?”

She shook her head, bit her lip, and sighed, relieving her feelings in the end by giving him a wax-paper packet the size of one ham sandwich, which turned out to hold about three weeks of meals in neat spell-wrapped packages, each one individually hot and ready when unwrapped. _Thanks, Mum_.

The first few days back at work were extremely awkward, facing up to concern and avid curiosity and the inevitable mountain of accumulated paperwork on his desk, trying to remember not to use his left hand and being reminded why not every time he forgot anyway—sometimes with a dull rheumatic ache, sometimes with a flare of pain that ran from fingertips to shoulder and left him blinking and dizzy. He found that his ability to concentrate, usually his one great strong point, varied wildly, from reading the first page of a thirty-two-page report four times without understanding a word of it to drafting a set of recommendations based on the recent changes to the laws on magical citizenship made by the Indian Ministry of Magic, and only realizing when the parchment was full that he’d begun on it after lunch and it was long dark outside.

At his flat he ate Molly’s good meals one by one and slept like the dead, woke gasping when he shifted his hand in his sleep, and failed to write any letters in response to the owls that came with more messages of concern from brothers or old classmates or onetime desk partners, or to read any of the books stacked on his bedside table, or otherwise to do anything not related to immediate daily survival.

Routine and sleep and food (what spells exactly had Molly cast on those packaged meals?) did help, though, much as Arthur had predicted they would. His hand was much the same after a few more days, but the fog of shock still hanging over his brain seemed to clear day by day, and it became easier to handle his normal workload and even to enjoy it, to the visible relief of his colleagues.

Then he got a paper airplane (made of stiff, no-nonsense olive drab A4) from the DMLE, instructing him to appear the following afternoon at an identity parade. They believed they had found the three who had attacked him.

The room was large and cold and bright; the DMLE spells, metallic and abrasive on the air, ensured that Percy, walking past the row of suspects and ringers, could not be seen or heard from their side. He breathed deep and kept his hand very still.

He did not recognize the biggest of them, the one who had dislocated his shoulder—there were two, maybe three it might have been, there was no way he could say with any certainty, as he told the Auror in charge—and as for the other one, he could hardly remember anything about him at all. But the smaller one—even with his hand still, the fingers throbbed—red-headed as he was himself, was hard to miss.

At Hogwarts, he would have stood near the end of the line of first-years, waiting for Professor McGonagall to reach “Weasley” in the alphabet, to be answered by the Sorting Hat’s brisk “Gryffindor!”. He was shorter than Percy himself or Bill or Ron, scrawnier than Charlie or the twins, but the hair and even the bone structure were unmistakeable.

The Auror was a tall middle-aged woman with a slight Caribbean lilt; her name was Averill. She couldn’t have missed the red hair any more than he had, but her face was impassive as she asked “And the third, Mr. Weasley? Were you able to recognize him or not?”

“Can—“ Percy cleared his throat. “May I ask his—their—names?”

“According to regulations, you may not. That is, you may ask, but I can’t answer you. Can you confirm the third suspect as one of your attackers, Mr. Weasley?”

“Yes,” he said, stumbling over the single word. “Yes, I can,” because he couldn’t think of any other way he would be likely to have a chance to speak to the redhead who was not actually one of his brothers.

The redheaded boy was held on remand, along with two of the others who had been identified as his known associates. Their names, he learned, were Kevin Hall and Rahman Hussain. The red-haired boy was Ranald Locker.

Ranald. Ronald. Could _that_ be a coincidence?

It was easier to write a paper airplane from the office than to attempt going to the Burrow, which would come with all kinds of unwanted questions as well as answers. _To: Arthur Weasley, Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office…_

His father’s reply came promptly. _I don’t remember any Lockers offhand, but could not say there were none; as you know your grandparents died not long after I left Hogwarts, and once your mother and I married and moved into the Burrow, I had no call to visit my calf country. A check with the Hogwarts rolls should clarify…_

Percy was already quite sure it wouldn’t; but to be on the safe side, he contacted Minerva McGonagall.

The Hogwarts deputy headmistress was a lady who understood the value of research. Her answer provided him with four Lockers who had attended Hogwarts in the last century (he had decided that information from any earlier would be too removed from the present day for help): Simon Locker (muggleborn of Hull, entered the school in 1907, killed fighting in the First War), Persephone and Psyche Locker (halfblood sisters, of London, entered in 1932 and 1935, Psyche killed in the Blitz, Persephone married to Victor Forrest), and Elisabeth Locker (muggleborn of Barrow-in-Furness, entered in 1955, married to an unnamed Muggle). Perhaps Elisabeth had had a child or two outside of wedlock…? but she was too old to be Ranald Locker’s mother and too young to be his grandmother, as well as being from entirely the wrong part of the country. No help there.

His hand throbbed. The window was dark, equinox neatly biting the work day and evening apart. Why isn’t it called the equidies? he wondered, mind skittering away from the useless parchments on his desk. Go home, Weasley, R.P. You won’t get any more real work done today anyway. Go back to your flat and have some dinner and get some sleep. Just the way you would have done before you heard Ranald Locker’s name or saw his freckly face, or had the memory of his fingers clutching your wrist.

Whoever Locker was—whoever his family were—he had cast a spell, one that had no tinge of Hogwarts about it at all.

What happened to the Muggleborns like Simon and Elisabeth, the halfbloods like Persephone and Psyche, who _didn’t_ go to Hogwarts?

Percy flexed his good hand and began another note to Minerva McGonagall.

 

“It’s nice to see you, Mr. Weasley. I understood you’ve had rather a hard time recently; I’m glad to see you looking well.”

“Thank you.” Percy managed not to look down at his left hand where it rested on the table. “I’m very sorry to call you away from the school. It’s kind of you to give me your time.”

“Nonsense,” Professor McGonagall said briskly. “Firstly, I would want to eat lunch in any case, and it’s no hardship to step out of the castle and have a change for once. Speaking of which, hello, Willa, kindly bring me the Scotch broth and a cup of tea, if you would.”

“Yes, Madam McGonagall, right away. And for you, sir?”

“Er―I’ll have the same, thanks.” If nothing else, Scotch broth could be eaten one-handed. “And secondly?”

“Pardon? Ah, I see. Secondly, it is in many ways a part of my remit to lend a hand to my one-time students where I may. And thirdly, I have a sense that you of all people are unlikely to come up to Hogsmeade on a business day out of a purely personal whim, regardless of any recent events.”

“You may…have a point.”

Willa returned to their table, deftly floating a teapot in the air while she set cups before each of them and poured; finally the teapot came to rest on the table with a delicate chink. She smiled at them and moved away; Percy drank tea thirstily, watching McGonagall sip.

“I have a number of questions…a variety of information I’d like to obtain, for…as you surmise…both personal and professional purposes. You’ll remember my inquiry a little earlier about the Locker family. This is…related. First, you have for many years been the Hogwarts staff member responsible for bringing Muggleborns their Hogwarts letters, yes?”

“Yes, of course. Since some years before you were born.”

“In general terms―I’m not asking for exact numbers―what percentage of Muggleborns receiving letters choose in the end not to attend Hogwarts?”

Minerva McGonagall’s fine-drawn eyebrows went up. “Now that is a very interesting question,” she said slowly. “You understand that I have nothing but a very general sense, of course…”

“That’s fine.”

“One quarter to one third, in any given year. On average.”

Percy swallowed. “I didn’t realize…it was so many. But when they could have--why did you never…”

“What was I to do? They had made their choice; what could I do, short of setting up a full-scale Muggleborn abduction program? I told them where Diagon Alley was. I told them how to find Platform 9 3/4. What else could I have done?”

“But…”

“Imagine it the other way around, Mr. Weasley. You at least know the Muggle world exists, but even so how would your parents have reacted if you had suddenly been presented with an acceptance letter to a school they’d never heard of, at the age of eleven?”

“My father would probably have been thrilled,” he said wryly.

“Yes, I remember what an enthusiastic student he was in Muggle Studies…and yet, you notice he did not in fact choose to send you to Muggle schooling. Ottery Magna Comprehensive is only a bicycle ride away from your home, and needs no letter of acceptance.”

Percy was silent.

“Here you are!” Willa said brightly, setting down steaming bowls before each of them. McGonagall murmured something in Scottish Gaelic―he recognized her customary Grace―and began to eat with efficient hunger. After a moment, he followed her lead; the barley and lamb stew was hot and comforting.

“If it’s an issue that interests you, I recommend considering the larger context as well. While I was not personally involved, I’ve been told that the percentage of Muggleborns coming to Hogwarts went up sharply in the twenties―around the time of the General Strike―and again during the austerity years after the war.”

“Times are hard, and any chance for your child is a good one,” Percy summarized.

“Exactly. Although it does not necessarily apply to individual families―I’ve found that children from poor and working-class households are no more likely to attend Hogwarts than their better-off counterparts.”

From there the conversation became statistical, and Percy left the café far more relaxed than he had entered it. It was easy to forget that no one could have survived for years as Albus Dumbledore’s Deputy Headmistress without a genuine gift for, and appreciation of, the minutiae of administration.

 

Some people thought of administration as a job, and some as a set of skills, and some as something that just happened somewhere out of sight while others were doing real work. Percy, with some reservations, knew it to be all of these things, but often thought of it more than anything as a language. Just like spellcasting: if you said “Incendio” and knew what you were doing about it, something would light on fire. If you said “short-term specialized initiative for enhancing the effective range of wizarding educational approaches with a view to underserved populations” and knew what you were doing about it, you found yourself in a cramped office with three other people and a limited, but existent, mandate and budget, plus business cards (the proper wizarding kind that displayed name, title, and owl/floo information when touched) identifying you as “R. Percival Weasley, Director, Alternative Initiative for Research on Youth.”

Getting ChoYeon Chang had been an unexpected bonus, granted for the simple reason that she was available for a Ministry internship, and since her presence at the Ministry itself was temporary—she would take up a position apprenticing with her father, a researcher in traditional Korean herbal medicomagic, after the New Year—it seemed easiest to assign her to a temporary office. Percy found her Ravenclaw intellectual curiosity invaluable, not to mention her general efficiency and her second-hand family knowledge of educational systems other than the British magical one. “Do you know anyone who didn’t go to Hogwarts?” he’d asked her.

Cho raised her eyebrows. “Apart from, like, my grandparents and all my second cousins and so on in Korea?”

“Oh. Er, yes, I mean in Britain. Of our age. I mean—apart from Muggles.”

She blinked. “No. Yes? I know a couple of people who are sort of extended family—I mean, they’re not actually related, we just see each other at the big Korean get-togethers every year. I guess you’d say they were Muggleborn, but their parents think it’s old-fashioned and not useful to do magic, not in the real world—okay, what they call the real world—and they went to Muggle school so they could get A-levels and sit for Oxbridge. Honggi’s at Cambridge now, and I think Hanna’s in fifth year at grammar school—except they call it the fifth form. I used to let her play with my wand back when I’d just started Hogwarts.”

“We need to talk to them,” Percy said, and the list began.

And continued, and got longer and longer until it surpassed the parchment inches of any essay he’d ever sweated blood over at school. For one thing, statistics from Hogwarts suggested that by far the highest ratio of births recorded in the Book of Wizardkind to 11-year-olds matriculating at Hogwarts was to be found within the borders of Wales. “Standoffish,” Minerva McGonagall said, with a Scot’s intolerance of her fellow Celts. “They have their own ways, always have had.”

“Which are…?” But she had not known. And so it was determined to add a Welsh wizard—one who had not attended Hogwarts—to Percy’s pocket task force. In the event it was one Branwen Harries, a witch from Aberystwyth who described herself, with convincing vagueness, as a jill-of-all-trades; she was of an age that Percy could only classify as “older than his brother Bill, younger than Professor McGonagall,” slender, brown-haired and sharp-tongued, but a good administrator and—once she grasped that they were not hell-bent on imposing mandatory Hogwarts attendance on every wizarding child in the British Isles—a cooperative colleague.

The fourth, last, and youngest member of their team was Ranald Locker.

Officially it was a form of community service, with which he was atoning for his assault (of the two others with him, one was helping rebuild damaged wizarding houses and the other working on a large parchment farm). Percy, sitting in the stalls at the short trial, had heard him say “Yeah, we knew he wasn’t the Minister himself, but what does it matter? He went to Hogwarts, he’s got a good Ministry job, he’s got _everything_. Us, we haven’t got _nothing_.”

Percy saw the light. That had come first, and then the AIRY idea, and it had been grinding frustration waiting for AIRY to be approved so he could make his offer. And even then they hadn’t let him make it in person; he’d nearly driven the imperturbable Auror Averill wild trying to get her to pass on just the wording he wanted. _I’m offering you the Ministry job you say you want. See what you can do with it--_.

He hadn’t actually dared to talk to anyone about it beforehand, apart from getting the permission of the court to use Locker’s community service hours in this fashion. In the event, he felt as surprised as anyone when Locker said yes. On their first day as a group he wondered what the other two would make of it—the assault and its perpetrators were, of necessity, known to them as the impetus for the initiative itself—but Cho had only raised her eyebrows and begun to talk to Locker as if he had been a year or two below her at Hogwarts, while Branwen made it clear that she couldn’t care less about the internal affairs of English wizards.

Locker—“Ran, nobody calls me Ranald”—had seemed more embarrassed than anything else. His formal apology had been made to Percy before the court, and they mostly avoided the subject altogether, focusing instead on the work.

Of which there was a great deal. They began, among other projects, with interviewing some of the Muggleborns on Minerva’s list. The number of Muggleborns who had never entered Hogwarts turned out to be far higher than anyone except Professor McGonagall herself could have expected.

 Maia Hendry was somewhere in her early forties, slim and stylish, a lecturer in the history of science at University College London. “Oh yes, I remember,” she said, over coffees in a student caff empty during the vac. “The cat lady. My parents were very impressed. So was I, but―there weren’t any rules. You couldn’t find out how it worked, only that it did. And they didn’t teach you literature or history―only the magical history―or science or maths or even languages.”

Branwen raised an eyebrow; Percy sipped his coffee and waited.

“Magic was wonderful, it was exhilarating that I could do these things―but it was a toy, you know? You couldn’t really get your teeth into it, there was no accompanying intellectual satisfaction. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do with magic half as much as I wanted to go to university.” 

“Didn’t want to leave me mates,” Robyn Timperley shrugged, showing them around Norwich Cathedral. She was a big buxom blonde girl with a friendly smile and a pronounced Norfolk accent, only a couple of years older than Percy. “That was five of us from primary school that was best mates, we ended up going all the way through GCSEs together. Me and Jen and Chrys and Ronnie and Steph. Still get together whenever we can, even though Chrys is down in the smoke now and Ronnie’s got her kids… Magic? Yes, but I’d have been by meself.”

“You might have made new friends at school…?” Cho suggested tentatively.

“That hent the same, is it? I wanted the friends I had. Friends hent, like, an umbrella you can get a new one of if you lose it, right? I wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t had me girls.”

“My mum was big into Black Power, what can I tell you,” Cal Bailey laughed. “Moss Side, the seventies, come on. So this pretty white lady shows up and turns into a fuckin’ cat? Mum says, are all the kids at this magic school of yours white? No, she says, we don’t concern ourselves with these things. Mum says, so how many black kids you got? And she starts countin’ on her fingers. Mum says, that’s good enough, my boy is growing up where he got more black people than he can count around him, if this magic is such a thing there’s got to be some more black folks doing it somewhere, maybe you just don’t know about them?”

“Did the professor get angry?” Ran asked.

“No, she just kind of shrugged, said she hoped Mum would reconsider and she’d tell us where to go in London if she did, and that was it. She was lucky Mum didn’t tell her where to go, eh?”

Ran snickered. “You didn’t ever, like, want to learn the magic stuff?”

Cal laid a finger along his nose. “Now, I’m not sayin’ I never went back to the islands after I got out of school, and I’m not sayin’ there wasn’t some old folks there who taught me a few things, and I’m not sayin’ I’ve never had no use for them since then…but I’m not sayin’ for sure any of that did happen either, right? Least said soonest, yeah?”

(“No, you cannot go on a fact-finding mission to Jamaica,” Percy said wearily to Ran that evening. “What do you think the Ministry budget looks like? Yes, I know Flooing and Apparating don’t cost anything much compared to aeroplanes―although I hope you haven’t forgotten the international Floo tariffs―but where do you plan to eat, not to mention sleep, while you’re there? No. Now look, there’s a very nice lady called Carmelina Johnson who runs the publicity department for the Wybourne Wyverns, and we’re going to ask her to tell you all you need to know about Jamaican magic…”).

 

At least once a day, sometimes several times, the planning office for alternative scholastic opportunities diverged into something along the lines of a seminar on spellcasting. Percy and Cho, of course, shared a background in the formalized Latinate magic of Hogwarts, with its specialized incantations and use of wands as standard; Cho had some experience of her grandparents’ traditional Korean work as well, but the real difference between them came in the reason they had been sorted into different Houses. Percy, unlike his brass-playing siblings, was no improviser; he learned the spells they were taught in class and set out to execute them as well as humanly possible. Cho’s natural tendencies, supported by seven years steeped in the ethos of the Ravenclaw common room, impelled her to research the background of each spell (“ _why_ we say this and not that, whether it was ever different”), as well as its potential modifications.

Branwen Harries had been trained in what she indicated was a tradition fully as old as that of Hogwarts, if not considerably older, and no less rigid in its way, but differently angled. Her magic was wandless, of course, but beyond that the spells were different, not only spoken in different words but constructed differently and creating different effects. Things which Hogwarts third-years used spells for without thinking twice about it, Branwen did by hand; and others, for which Percy and Cho would have needed to come up with cumbersome combinations of inexact spells, she handled with a few fluid words of Welsh.

Ran and his mates had a handful of old-fashioned Latinate spells which had been passed along informally, chief among them _simile visi_ , which had let them find one another in the first place; but most of the magic they did was jury-rigged or hand-crafted, depending on how you wanted to look at it, experimenting until they came up with something that worked. Percy and Branwen had both been shocked, for different reasons, that it was even possible to cast spells in English. (Cho had shrugged. “Latin works. Korean works. Why should English be the only language that isn’t magical?”) Ran’s outlook, thus, was a combination of experimentalism wilder than anything Ravenclaws dreamed of with pragmatism more ruthless than anything a Gryffindor could muster. Theoretical study of magic was something for the privileged few who went to Hogwarts; “our lot” needed spells that worked.

“You figure it out. My mates—Kevin’s rubbish at working out anything new, he couldn’t come up with a spell to boil water if you gave him a gas ring and a pan, but he’s got a lot of power with it, anything he casts comes up beautiful. Rahman’s mum and dad taught him a bunch of spells they used back in Pakistan, only he wasn’t supposed to teach them to us, on account of we’re not Muslim. It’s like, their spells are supposed to work because they, like, believe?

He only started hanging around with us ‘cause he fell for Tracy—Kevin’s sister—and wanted an excuse to go over to hers that his parents wouldn’t go mad about, and after a while we started swapping spells, yeh? I was the best in our gang at making up new ones,” he added, with embarrassed pride.

“So I gathered,” Percy couldn’t help saying, flexing his bad hand.

Ran flushed deeply and miserably, his freckles momentarily subsumed in the tide of red. “I, um…thought I said I was sorry about that. Wouldn’t’ve tried it on you if…I’d known you weren’t, like, a bad lot.”

Percy was at a loss for a reply; watching them both go redder, Cho filled in crisply “You’re well within the grand Hogwarts tradition of trying out spells you should know better than to use at all on human subjects, usually with really disastrous results. Maybe forget how to cast that one, no matter how proud you were of it?”

Ran ducked his head, his blush fading to pallor. “I, er, I…plan on doing that. Hadn’t taught it to no one else yet either and…not going to, eh?”

“Fair enough,” Percy said, recovering slightly from the paralysis induced by embarrassment and discomfort. “Moving on. Does Ran’s situation hold true in Wales as well?”

“Certainly _not_.” Branwen—deeply, even passionately opposed to any changes being made in the Welsh system, not that they called it a system exactly—enlarged on this, at some length. “It works for us. Why should we change it when there’s nothing wrong with it? And there’s centuries of tradition behind it―the Saxons couldn’t change us, the Romans couldn’t. You think you can do it single-handed, Weasley?”

“I hope I know better than to try.” Percy might be a Gryffindor but he was still a violinist, not a trumpet player. “Tell me. Am I right in thinking that the result would be either the closing of Wales―the Welsh wizards and witches disappearing for good into the hills―or all-out war?”

Branwen hesitated, too honest to give the answer she clearly wanted to. “Probably not the war. If we were going to take you lot on directly, we would have done it many, many years ago. There’s not enough in it for us, is it? But the closing of Wales―yes. Yes. It’s been done before. It could happen again. And the few who did leave us to go to Hogwarts, they would not be able to return.”

“So you lot are fine with what you got already, no changes needed, right?” Ran said impatiently. “Just tell me one thing, does everyone get taught like you did? What about kids that don’t get Hogwarts letters, do they get the same treatment?”

“What about the Muggleborn?” Cho added. “How do you reach them? How many of them learn magic? What happens to the ones who don’t?”

Branwen made an impatient gesture. “All right all right, I’ll look into it. Bet you I won’t find a problem anything like what you’ve got in England.”

“You’re on,” Cho said immediately. “What are the stakes? Box of chocolates from Zaubermann’s―what?” to Percy and Ran, who were both blinking at her. “It’s not like I’m betting money.”

“Please do not gamble on matters related to our work,” Percy said heavily. “If you really want a box of chocolates from Zaubermann’s that badly, I will personally go out and buy you one. Outside of office hours.”

Cho went very pink. Ran wolf-whistled, looking as if only being the most junior person there was stopping him from putting his comment into words. Branwen rolled her eyes.

“Now that we’ve got that settled, can we get back to business? Some of us would like to have time for a little social life _outside_ the office.”

“As I just made clear―“ Percy began.

Branwen patted his shoulder. “Yes yes, we know. Now let’s go back to talking about the arrangements for coordination between the Welsh learning and Hogwarts.”

 

Cho was mildly horrified to realize that, inside of a month after starting her Ministry job, she knew exactly where Percy Weasley was in relation to herself, all the time. He might as well have had a Trace on him. She knew when he was in the office, of course, but also when he had gone down the hall or onto other floors to other people’s offices, and where; she knew when he would go to lunch in the Ministry cafeteria, and when he would go out for a sandwich in the Alley, and when he would forget to eat altogether and be found snapping at people late in the afternoon, pale and irritable from low blood sugar. She knew what time he signed in every morning and what time he left every night, and what events were likely to push his leaving time later.

She also knew that the one place she’d originally expected to find him was the one place he never was: rehearsals for the Ministry orchestra.

Cho herself hadn’t been in her job two days before a paper airplane landed on her desk, unfolding itself with a limber flick, an everyday spell stylishly cast. _Miss Chang_ , she read, in a vaguely familiar handwriting. _Glad to hear you’re joining the bureaucratic hordes, however briefly. No such thing as too many violas, as you well know, especially ones of your caliber. The Ministry of Magic Employees’ Symphony Orchestra meets twice a week, seven to nine pm, strings on Mondays and tutti on Wednesdays. Look forward to seeing you there. D. L. Halley (Misuse of Magics Dept.)._

Dana Halley had been the principal violist at Hogwarts when Cho was a second-year; she remembered him vaguely, tall and brown-haired and a little gawky, with an engaging grin. At her first rehearsal she found he hadn’t changed much. He and the other violists welcomed her warmly, finding her sheet music for the next concert and introducing her around. For an amateur orchestra the standard was quite high, although rehearsals only twice a week seemed very sparse after Hogwarts. As a new school leaver, she was the youngest there (apart from a few of her erstwhile classmates, who waved from their respective sections); the oldest was probably Madam Marchbanks, playing bass clarinet while pushing three figures. There were Ministry employees from all departments, even a few Unspeakables.

But Percy Weasley, she realized, was not there.

In the long run, what did she have to lose, Cho told herself. In four months she’d be on an island off the south coast of Korea, nobody would know her as anything but _Dr. Chang’s younger girl who grew up overseas and is still getting the language back so don’t be offended if she forgets her honorifics_ , and nobody anywhere near her would have red hair.

She sent a paper airplane to Dana, letting him know she’d miss rehearsal that night, and stayed at her desk until almost seven. When she ran out of work to do, she reorganized the drawers until the paperclips got bored and started making jewelry on their own. _Not the look I had in mind_ , she muttered, untangling the necklace that had worked its way over her collarbones. The paperclips jingled sulkily, and she noticed that it wasn’t just a chain but had a pattern of stars.

Oh, what the hell, she said to herself, remembering the _nothing to lose_ , and left it on.

Percy had been in the archive down the hall all afternoon, on one of his deep-dive research outings; something about the history of Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, but he would almost certainly emerge with an extra stack of documents on some entirely different, if fascinating, topic or three. Cho tidied her desk and made for the archive room.

The hallway was dim, and there were no more paper airplanes swooping overhead; some nineteenth-century worthy in the only portrait on display had retreated to the far background of his painting and seemed to be having dinner with some sepia-tinted friends.

Cho swallowed hard. Dinner, she told herself firmly, reminding her stomach that she was supposed to be hungry. She took the few steps remaining, and knocked on his door.

“Yes, come in?”

Swallow again, touch her paperclip necklace, open the door.

Percy was exactly the way she was used to seeing him now: sitting at the archivist’s desk with his shoulders a little hunched and inkstains on his fingers, glasses sliding down his nose (he used to push them up with his left hand, the violin held between his chin and shoulder, and it always made Cho nervous because a viola was just enough bigger that you couldn’t _do_ that). The archive room was tiny, and the one window was behind his head, and there were files and parchments stacked on the desk, and―hanging from the ceiling?

So the first thing Cho said wasn’t her carefully rehearsed line of dialogue, but “What spell is that? You don’t use that in our office, my parents don’t use it either, is that safe for consistent maintenance? And what if you need something from the middle of the stack?”

Percy blinked, followed the direction of her eyes, and smiled slightly, pushing up his glasses with his right hand. “Still a Ravenclaw to the bone, I see. The spell is _adhero ad tecti_. If it’s cast with a _tempus non fugit_ it’s sufficiently self-maintaining that one doesn’t have to worry about, er, death by paperwork, but I don’t recommend it for use in crowded offices; it can be vulnerable to physical interaction, if you will. Airplane memos coming here are enjoined to fly low.” He stopped for breath. “As for papers from the middle of the stack, an Accio will not disturb the overall equilibrium. Shall I demonstrate?”

“Um, no, thank you.” Cho was blushing so hard the skin over her cheekbones felt too tight. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…I…I’ll try the spell, but not in the office. I…I hope I’m not bothering you. I was thinking that…it’s a bit late...”. Pull yourself together, ChoYeoni, you haven’t lost your head this way since third year. Fighting, me. “If you’re at a good stopping place, I wondered if you’d like to get a quick dinner on the Alley?”

Her blush seemed to have transferred itself seamlessly to Percy, whose freckles were now somewhat obscured. “That would…be…yes, that would be very nice,” stiffly. “But isn’t it orchestra rehearsal night for you?”

“Oh. Yes, well…I took the night off.”

Percy’s eyebrows flicked up, but he didn’t comment. “Well. In order not to make your sacrifice in vain…May I have ten minutes or so to put an end to things here? I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Not at all.” Where did he learn those manners, anyway. The other Weasleys were all nice blokes in their ways, but that careful courtesy was foreign to them.

In the end he had to tap her on the shoulder to get her attention: there was a narrow floor-to-ceiling bookshelf tucked in by the door, and by the time he was ready to leave Cho had plunged into a dusty leatherbound tome called _Bloody Children of the New Century: The Effects of the Great War on British Spellwork_. “Why don’t we use some of these?” she asked him, emerging reluctantly from Chapter Two. “I’m not sure they ever taught us a spell at Hogwarts that hasn’t been used for hundreds of years on end. I’m not sure they taught us there _were_ spells that weren’t hundreds of years old. And all these people were making new spells like nobody’s business, because they had to―“

Percy pushed his glasses up his nose again, shrugging his coat around his shoulders. “My own opinion is that the Hogwarts staff decided at some point that they were much better off not giving teenage wizards and witches the idea that new spells could be made. Consider my brothers―the twins―what they might have gotten up to, for instance.”

“I suppose. But I don’t think that’s a very good reason for cutting off a whole avenue of exploration!”

At that Percy smiled at her, his face suddenly lit, and she was immediately back in second year (his fifth), at the end of Tchaikovsky Five, seeing him smile for sheer exhilaration and adrenalin rush, and that was it, she’d never be the same.

“Sometimes I regret very much not having been Sorted into Ravenclaw,” he said. “Please borrow the book if you’d like to; I think you’ll find the later chapters equally interesting.”

“Thank you!” Cho tucked the book carefully into her shoulder bag. “Well…shall we?”

They went to Jehangir, her favorite Indian place on Diagon Alley: little and dimly lit, with a lot of small shining mirrors and brass decorations gleaming out of faintly dusty swags of purple and green sari cloth. The menu was short, but pretty much everything Cho had tried so far was delicious, and it wasn’t fancy enough to be expensive. Anyway, she reminded herself, she actually had a salary now, even if not a very big one and only for four months.

To her relief, Percy liked Indian. They ordered samosas and saag paneer and lamb vindaloo and a pile of paratha and sweet lassis, and Cho almost forgot whom she was with for a moment when she took the first sip. She loved home food too, but Indian food was right up there with orchestra practice on the list of things she was going to miss _so much_ in village Korea. Which, lulled by the lassi, she found she’d said out loud.

Percy looked at her viola case, leaning against the wall by her chair. “You didn’t think of joining one of the professional orchestras?”

“I’m not really that good,” she said automatically, and then added “Maybe I might try some day, but it’s not the right time for me now.” Her father wouldn’t have argued if she’d gone to the auditions, but… . Anyway, he had handed her the line she was waiting for. “You, um…do you still play? When your hand, I mean…”

“Yes, I used to play in in my spare time, yes, I will probably do so again when my hand is fully recovered, no, I still have not joined the Ministry orchestra, no, I still do not plan to do so,” Percy recited precisely.

Cho’s mouthful of flaky pastry and warm, spicy potato was suddenly as tasteless as anything from the Ministry canteen. She swallowed, with some effort, and reminded herself again _in four months I’ll be in Korea_. “Since we’ve already established that I’m an incorrigible Ravenclaw, then―why not?” Before he could finish his own mouthful and answer, she added “Not because you don’t have enough time left over from work, I know. Everyone has a busy job to some degree, and at school you had time to lead the orchestra and still take twelve OWLs and eight NEWTs.”

Percy actually flushed a little at that. “I’m surprised to find you remember any such thing. That was a long time ago.”

“You don’t think I was paying attention?”

Cho let that line hang in the air for a while, while their curries appeared on the table and they continued eating in momentary silence. She watched Percy try to figure out how to eat the paratha without dripping melted butter down his crisp white shirt, and sipped her lassi to cut the bite of the vindaloo.

“Violinists are two a Knut, after all,” Percy said after a moment, setting his wedge of paratha down carefully. “I’m not particularly needed, and it’s true that my job keeps me very busy.”

“You like being busy. You’re entirely efficient enough to make time for the orchestra, if you wanted―intended to. And you’d be an asset to any orchestra, up to and including the professional groups.”

“You’re too kind,” he said, very dryly, and served himself a tidy spoonful of spinach.

He was going to leave it at that, he really was. Cho put down her fork for a moment and sat still.

Percy cleared his throat. “Why does it, er, concern you?”

Now it was Cho’s turn to pick up a paratha shield. “I liked playing with you,” she said into the warm bread. “I was only in fourth year when you left school. I wasn’t much good. I’d like the chance to be in an orchestra with you again, now that I’m a bit better myself.” Before he could give her the anodyne “I’m flattered” response she knew he was preparing, she went on boldly, “And if you really have found something to do you care about more than―even more than you cared about playing the violin, well, believe me, I want to know what it is. For my own reference,” firmly.

She waited, working her way through the paratha triangle, hoping she hadn’t just made the biggest fool of herself since―well, since fourth year. _In four months_ , she reminded herself.

“My parents were both the first generation in their families to go to Hogwarts,” Percy said. “You’ve heard Ran and me tracking down the family connection. My Weasley grandfather—Ran’s granddad’s brother—went to a little wizarding school in Kent, until he was fifteen. It’s long gone now. He earned a living selling shoes to wizards on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells.” Percy took a breath, ate a little saag paneer, swallowing punctiliously before he began to speak again. “None of the Prewett side went to school anywhere―they were tenant farmers, on a wizarding estate in Norfolk. The Burrow―our house―was in my mother’s family, we could never have found a house big enough for nine otherwise, let alone with a garden. My father might have made a better living if he’d gone in for other work, of course, but even a quite menial Ministry job was an honor for the family.”

Cho thought of the _masul kwago_ , the traditional exams for the wizarding civil service in Korea, and her great-grandfather, and everything that had disappeared in the wars.

“So it was always―“ He stumbled. “I was always going to go to work at the Ministry. Especially since my older brothers―“

“Bill and Charlie? My sister used to talk about them.”

“Yes. They both have good jobs, but neither was ever interested in following in Dad’s―in my father’s footsteps, and as for the younger ones--!” They both paused for a moment over the image of Fred and George Weasley as Ministry peons. “And as you so kindly pointed out, I did well at Hogwarts. The Ministry was glad to have me.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Cho drank the last drops of her lassi. “I understand why you hold the job you do, Percy.” It couldn’t be the first time she’d spoken his name to his face, but it sounded somehow intimate enough to embarrass her. She rushed on. “But not why it has to mean getting rid of your violin.”

“I haven’t got rid of it!” so sharply they both jumped. “I wouldn’t do such a thing. It was a gift, that violin. When I was little. From Dad’s boss―he knew we didn’t have…Anyway, I couldn’t,” much softer.

They sat in silence for a few moments. Cho stopped herself from reaching out to pat her viola case reassuringly.

“Well.” She could see Percy consciously returning to his normal tones, pedantic, precise, pleasant. “If nothing else, I’ll look forward to hearing you play again at the next MMESO concert, then.　Halley is very sorry your employment here isn’t more permanent, I understand.”

And are you? she wondered.

 

In the event, it was sooner than the next concert that he heard her play, and indeed that she heard him again. It happened very simply that the leader of the Ministry orchestra, Allegra Dimbleby, was an Unspeakable, and that duties of some Unspeakable kind were to keep her from attending rehearsals for some weeks, and subsequently the concert itself. Dana Halley and his fellow principals, mostly young and eager, put their heads together for a solution and remembered—possibly on a careless word Dana might have heard from Cho about her office—that a recent leader of the Hogwarts orchestra was lying fallow within the Ministry itself.

"He did good things for the orchestra at Hogwarts," Dana argued. "And he's not one of those me-me-look-at-me types."

"Wouldn't matter if he were, if he's sitting in for Allegra," the principal cellist pointed out. "The leader has to be all look-at-me. Never did figure out how Allegra ended up there."

Allegra Dimbleby herself chuckled. "We can't all be attention seekers like you, Ambrose." She was very much not in line with the popular conception of an Unspeakable as a shadowy cloaked figure with unmemorable features, being plump and pretty and perpetually disheveled, with flyaway light hair, green eyes, and a tendency to wear knit shawls in jewel-bright colors; however, if she wanted to fade into the background she was able to do so on the instant, disconcertingly, seemingly without exerting any actual force of magic. "You overlapped with Weasley at school, didn't you, Mairi?"

The first bassist nodded. "I agree with Dana," laconically. "He'll do."

Katherine Tavenner frowned. She was the principal second violin, a small delicate-looking woman of understated elegance, who kept the administrative side of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement running. "Weasley, R.P.―he was the one involved in that incident with the hedgewizards a few months back, wasn't he? Didn't that leave him with some kind of impairment? Are we sure he still plays?"

Dana and Ambrose looked blank. Allegra raised her eyebrows.

Mairi Rowle said "I can ask the St. Mungo's liaison in my department, but I think it would be simpler just to ask the man himself."

"So that's what we'll do," Allegra said, with the air of lifting her bow from the strings after the final cadence. "Dana?"

"Yes, all right. And if he says he can't?"

"We can approach Virgilia Foxe or Inderjeet Sahal…or you can sub in, Kath," with a glint of laughter.

"Very funny," Katherine, the oldest of the five, said drily. "Let us see what happens."

 

Percy said no, and no again, and no, I really can’t, and no, I’m terribly out of practice, and no, there must be any number of other people who would do it marvelously, and every other variation on “no” that he could come up with on the spur of the moment. He thought it would have worked on Dana, who had a violist’s ability to suit himself to the mood of the room; but then Katherine Tavenner tilted her head delicately and said in her mild second-violinish voice, “But then I understand you were very unfortunately injured a little while back. Perhaps it would be too much of a strain?”

Five months of behaving daily as if there was as little wrong with his hand as possible had become a very powerful habit, Percy found out, hearing himself say no again, except this time “no, no, not at all” actually meant “yes, I accept your offer,” and once he’d said it it was too late to back out.

He thought he had decided to go to the (his) first rehearsal without practicing at all, to make the point that he’d been dragged in against his will after months of not touching an instrument (even when he had two good hands to touch one with), and if he couldn’t make the right sort of noises, well, then he could gracefully bow out after one day, no harm done. But habit took over there too: you did not go to rehearsal without practicing first, you just didn’t, at least he didn’t, and the more so in the leader’s chair. An unprepared leader could take down the whole orchestra, and it wasn’t their fault.

In the end, he spent most of the night before playing.

He began with the Brahms symphony that was actually on the program, because if he couldn’t play the sweet, straightforward G major theme at the beginning of the fourth movement, he wasn’t going to be able to play anything at all. Once he’d started, though, he couldn’t stop himself going all the way through to the triumphant conclusion; he was out of breath when he’d finished, and his hand was throbbing—not pain so much as a violent pulse as if his heart had relocated itself there—but he found he was grinning like a loon, alone in the shell of Muffliato in his flat, and had to stop and wipe his eyes before he could turn the pages back to the first movement and begin work properly.

Walking into the room at his first rehearsal the next day was a nightmare of self-consciousness, but Katherine Tavenner materialized beside him (he didn’t think she’d actually Apparated, but she was the type to master silent Apparation if anyone would) with a brisk question about bowing, and that kept him occupied until he was actually sitting in the leader’s chair.

The deputy principal with whom he shared a desk turned out to be Gilead Gartrett who was Private Secretary to the Minister of Magic. Percy was momentarily overcome by a spasm of entirely professional shyness—one of the most important men in the Ministry was turning pages for him…!—until Gartrett said briskly, in a rich voice with a slight, comforting Dorset burr, “Good of you to step in, Weasley. Now the second theme here, Miss Dimbleby would have it that the crescendo doesn’t start until the fourth measure, but I can’t be doing with it. What do you say?” After that there was no trick to it.

The playing itself, though shot through with unpredictable moments of pain from his bad hand, was what it had always been, absorbing, sometimes frustrating, joyful, a fulfilling day of work fitted into the two hours-odd of rehearsal time. He began to get used again to the familiar weight of the violin case across his back, walking to and from work every day.

 

The days wore on apace, and the orchestra and the task force moved on in their disparate directions, busier daily by degrees.

“Budget,” Percy said to himself blackly, glaring down at the improbable stacks, heaps, swirls and eddies of parchment on his desk. “Budget, budget, budget, budget…”

“You sound like my nephew,” Branwen said, making him jump. She set down a large mug of coffee on one of the stabler stacks of parchment. “Good will and no obligation.”

“Thank you,” he said, accustomed to her Welsh manners by now, and drank as much of it as he could pour down his throat at one go. “Is your nephew unusually concerned with financial issues?”

“No, but when he finds a word he likes he tends to repeat it. He’s two and a half.” She sat down at her own desk and sipped in a more moderate fashion. “Are we that short of money then?”

“We―as in you, Miss Chang, Ran, and myself―are fine, in the sense that our own salaries and expenses are well within budgetary bounds. Our recommendations for action, on the other hand, are not. Not even slightly.”

Branwen grinned. “And this is only occurring to you now?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Weasley, this whole mad project of ours is about revolutionizing wizarding education in the entire British Isles. What about that made you think it wasn’t going to cost? If you thought it could all be done on a shoestring, you must tie your shoes a different way than I do.”

“I’m sure you don’t mean that the way it sounds,” Cho said from the doorway, coming in with yet another armload of parchments. Percy considered bending down and retying his shoes so that she wouldn’t see his instant blush. “How many zeroes are on the final figure?”

“I’m not likely to have a final figure ready until I’ve put in several more days…and possibly nights at this rate…of work. There are all too many issues concerned. But I already have a great deal more zeroes than comfortable.”

Cho put down her parchments on her own desk and began to go through them at great speed, separating the large messy pile into one large and two small stacks. “Are you worried that they’ll take one look at the budget and reject the whole thing out of hand?”

“Yes,” Percy said, rather louder than he had meant to. “I mean―Madam Harries―“

“Branwen, for heaven’s sake, how many―“

“―you’re quite right that it’s a huge undertaking and it’s only reasonable to expect it to cost the earth. But I’m not sure they’ll see it that way. I think they hoped we’d just recommend that they send out a handful of extra Hogwarts letters, maybe create a little outreach task force from Hogwarts professors or some such…”

“…and everything would be Just Fine,” Cho finished with heavy irony. “So we need three things.”

“Pardon?”

“One, we need the plan itself. We’re already well on our way. Two, we need the budget, one that gets in what has to be there and still stays as streamlined as possible.”

“You want to leave that to me,” Ran said indistinctly from the doorway; he was halfway through a Bakebetter tart and had a selection of other delicacies from the canteen tucked under one arm and his battered spiral notebook under the other. “Anyone want a pumpkin pasty?”

“Just because you don’t like them,” Cho said mildly.

Ran swallowed his mouthful and let his burden cascade onto his own desk. “No argument. You want it or not?”

“Yes please,” she said sunnily, and he tossed her the package.

Percy cleared his throat.

“Oh, sorry. You want something? I’ve got a Spellsea bun. You like those, right?”

Percy made the catch with his good hand, wondering absently what Ran-casting-an-ugly-spell-in-an-alley would have made of Ran-supplying-sweets. “Actually I meant, why do we want to leave the budget to you? I didn’t know you had, er…”

“Money smarts? Oh, practically a Name at Lloyd’s, me.” Ran shrugged at their blank faces. “Well, you’ll have to dress it up pretty so it looks like whatever they’re used to looking at. But I’m the one grew up working-class, right?” He took another bite of tart and went on thickly, “Make the money go further. Figure out what you’ve got to have and what you can do without, and where you can make do and mend. Not just splash out on whatever you think you want, right?”

Percy swallowed. “If you think my parents raised seven children on a civil servant’s salary without figuring that out―“ he began, and broke off at the look on Ran’s face―more in pity than in anger. “Civil servant’s salary” meant two very different things to them, even though he knew that comfortable and Hogwarts-educated or not, Molly Weasley was a pro at make do and mend.

“All right,” he said, instead of finishing the sentence. “See how many zeroes you can cut off the bottom line. Right now you wouldn’t be able to understand what I’ve got―“ It was only because he’d looked up from the parchments to open the pastry wrapping that he saw Ran’s expression change, flickering from hurt to sullenness. “That is not what I meant,” interrupting himself. “Any more than I could understand what’s in your, er, notebook. We all have our own idiosyncratic methods―“ he decided not to hear the snort from Branwen’s direction―“and the financial information I have right now isn’t arranged for anyone but me to understand it.” He took a large bite of the sticky-sweet bun to stop himself consulting Ran’s face again. “When I’ve done that, I’ll hand it over to you and you can tell me what to take out.”

Ran gulped down the rest of his tart before he answered. “Sounds right enough.”

Percy nodded, washed down his mouthful of bun with another swig of coffee, and turned back to Cho. “You said, three things?”

She blinked. “Oh. Yes. Well, the plan, and the budget. And then a really pretty, shiny presentation of it. One that makes them like it first off, and also comes up in advance with all the questions they could possibly ask and thinks up answers, and has blocks ready for all the holes they could possibly poke in it.”

“It’s too bad we don’t have a Slytherin on staff,” Percy said ruefully. (He was already fairly sure that, had he entered Hogwarts, Ran would have been sorted a Gryffindor like his cousins.) “Unless that would be you, Madam…ah, Branwen?”

“If the shoe fits,” Branwen sniffed. “We have never believed in dividing ourselves that way…all right. I will handle the manipulation, never let it be said the Welsh couldn’t tell a man what he doesn’t want to hear in a way that makes him thinks he asked for it…”

“Excellent.” Percy drank off the last of his coffee and got up to find more. “Let us get down to business, then.”

 

As Branwen had pointed out, the wonder was—if anything—that there were _only_ this many zeros on the final figures. The problem—no, the situation—they faced was dazzlingly multifaceted. Naturally the highest priority was the kids like Ran and his gang—magical, but unable to attend Hogwarts for any one of a dozen reasons, all of which needed to be addressed differently and with urgency. Strongest and cruelest was the iron, underlying, unspoken class system of wizarding Britain, seized in place since the days of Hogwarts’ founders, when there must have seemed no reason to give seven years of education to witches and wizards who would spend their lives herding sheep or throwing shuttles. The world had changed, but not as much as you would think; Hogwarts letters were still sent out on criteria hundreds of years out of date.

Others received their letters now at eleven, but never set foot on the Hogwarts Express, held back by decades or centuries of bitter family tradition, by parents who had left Hogwarts of their own volition or been expelled and would not send their children there, by family bonds or needs or quirks which made seven years of living separately unthinkable.

Then there were the Muggleborn children who had chosen not to go or been forbidden to go, and the adults they grew up into—Maia, Robyn, Cal, so many others, still with the capacity for magic they’d been born with, and likely to have children who shared it too. No one could be forced to learn magic, but some of them might want the chance, even now.

Like Cal (one surmised), or like Ran’s friend Rahman, there were many whose education came from elsewhere. The West Africans mostly called themselves witchfinders, not witches, and had strong oral traditions separate from their formal schooling. The West Indians were so reluctant to speak about their magical practices that Percy’s group still had no clear idea of the exact state of magical education among the Caribbean-British communities; a few, among them Angelina and Clarissa Johnson’s parents, sent their children to Hogwarts for the same reason a few Muggle West Indians sent their sons to Eton or their daughters to St. Paul’s. Others seemed to keep magic in the family, parent or grandparent to child, or used annual visits back to the islands for intensive training.

Cho’s parents knew one or two wizarding Korean families who had sent their children back to study at the _Nambang Masulgwan_ in Pusan (“although Dad says the Hogwarts of Korea, except that’s not what he calls it, was always the wizarding school in Chongjin, so more people have their children educated abroad these days”). Only a few of the wizarding Chinese in Britain sent their children to Hogwarts; there turned out to be a thriving network of Sunday magic classes taught in Cantonese to children and teenagers attending Muggle schools. Some of the more recent immigrants sent their children to board at the Hall of Oriental Sorcery (to give it the name it was known by in Britain) in Hong Kong.

Magical practice among the South Asians was fragmented by religion; for the Pakistani and Bangladeshi wizarding families, magic was inextricably intertwined with Islam, and the correct practice thereof almost a sixth pillar. Boys studied at wizarding masjids, girls at home with their mothers and grandmothers, though some mosques now offered mixed classes. For the Hindu and Sikh Indians magic was influenced by religious tradition but far more secular in daily practice, making them somewhat more inclined to integrate with the mainstream British wizarding communities at roughly the same rate their Muggle cousins did.

The Welsh were mostly well-served by their customs and traditions, but even Branwen had had to admit grudgingly that some habits were straining under the forces of change; the resurgence of Welsh-medium education among the Muggles had made some wizarding families more inclined to put their children into Muggle schools, for one. And then, even among the fiercely Nationalist and inward-turning Welsh wizarding community, there were those who left for wizarding London or Birmingham or Hogsmeade temporarily or permanently, and found themselves facing the question of employment.

In the mainstream wizarding world, being a Hogswarts graduate was a basic precondition of employment. What job you could actually get depended on how many NEWTs you had and with what grades (and on how pure your blood was and whom you knew), but the jobs you could get without a Hogwarts diploma were menial, the kind of backroom work that nobody wanted (dishwashing at the Leaky Cauldron or the other restaurants in Diagon Alley, a job for which cleaning spells were inefficient on the large scale, was typical); a few somewhat more appealing jobs in provincial towns where wizarding folk of any kind were relatively scarce. Percy had first assumed that Knockturn Alley would be a fertile field of employment for non-graduates, but a few cautious inquiries had found this not to be so: the Dark Arts wanted qualified employees just as the Lighter side did, Mr. Burkes had told him sniffily. There were no openings for _those_ people.

Percy and his team had struggled with an overall phrasing for people born with magic who had not attended Hogwarts. “Uneducated” was both inflammatory and inaccurate (look at Maia Hendry and her double doctorate). “Non-traditionally educated,” “deprived of access to standard wizarding education,” were mouthfuls and got a look of incredulous contempt from Ran (“sounds like the blokes from the council”. “I _am_ a bloke from the council, for all intents and purposes,” Percy retorted). “Not our lot,” “those foreigners,” “plebs,” “underprivileged,” “magical failures,” and so on…there were all too many options in use among certain Hogwarts graduates to choose from, if they had wanted to. Branwen had summed them all up in “non-H,” with her tongue all the way in her cheek. In the end they’d settled on “extramural witches and wizards,” which was recondite indeed, but odd enough that at least there wasn’t anyone in whom it called up unwelcome associations.

 

Percy began to wonder how, before returning to the orchestra, he had ever possibly managed to avoid inadvertent self-Transfiguration into a confusion of scribbled-over parchments, dusty tomes of magical precedent, and feather-gnawed quills. Every Monday and Wednesday, he made sure their office closed at six. (Ran had to go home by six every day anyway, even when he complained about it; seventeen-year-olds working overtime did not form a recognized part of community service. Branwen had an after-hours life she did not talk about, so none of the rest of them were sure whether it involved child-raising, clubbing, communing with nature in the Welsh mountains, or something else again.)

Percy and Cho picked up their instrument cases and went to the canteen for a quick pre-rehearsal dinner. It wasn’t that he actually meant to eat dinner with her every rehearsal day; it was just that they were going from the same place to the same place, by the way of the same place, and it would have been rather more awkward to arrange not to eat together.

Things about her that he noticed only subconsciously in the office came to the fore during their dinners. She preferred long skirts (or sometimes wide-legged trousers) and round-necked tops to formal robes when she could get away with it; when she turned her head to the right he could see the permanent reddened mark left under her jaw by the viola, the twin to his own violin bruise. She had wide-ranging gourmet tastes and a guilty passion for Jaffa Cakes, both Muggle and wizarding versions. She had a Ravenclaw’s voracious need to _know_ without any one focus: her father’s herbal work, which she would be assisting with when they went back to Korea, interested her but was not her own vocation per se.

“But is there nothing you’d _rather_ be doing—studying—finding out?” he asked one evening when they were both dazed with a day spent half digging out arcane magicolegal precedents and half interviewing sullen and distrustful young people who considered the word Hogwarts anathema.

“The way you’d rather be playing the violin?” Cho said.

“But…”

She shook her head and poked doubtfully at a dispirited carrot in her stew, and the air between them ran clear again. “I don’t really have a _rather_ , I guess? My father’s work, our task force stuff, the orchestra, Vi Hollis and Peter Sobel going on about next-generation flying carpets in the Ravenclaw common room at two am, that book of yours about First War spells, my cousin Honggi’s psychology textbooks, they all get me. Everything is interesting.”

Everything is interesting. Percy let his eyes dwell on her neat square cheekbones, the sharp defined eyelids, her eyes unexpectedly not black but the deepest amber. When their eyes met she blushed deeply, crimson to the hairline, but said only “I think there’s time for a pudding before rehearsal,” and got up to fetch her plate.

With only a week or so to go before their concert, that night’s rehearsal was long and intense. As well as the Brahms symphony, they were beginning with Nielsen’s “Helios” overture and finishing off with Schubert’s pocket “Magnificat.” The latter was no particular technical strain for the orchestra; Percy was somewhat concerned that they had barely rehearsed with the chorus and soloists, but the conductor—Hector Levenstein, a swarthily handsome semi-professional who also did some work as a backroom boy for the Hit Wizards—assured him that it would be fine, always had been before, and that they couldn’t easily assemble a hundred and fifty-odd people to rehearse a nine-minute piece.

The Helios Overture was great fun. Nielsen, a wizarding composer, had written the piece to be playable by either magical or Muggle orchestras, but in the case of the former it created a natural wandless magic effect whereby the concert hall gradually brightened with the delicate light of sunrise, which built to a dazzling midday blaze before fading to a golden sunset and finally a gentle twilight once again. Percy admired the magical and musical craftmanship very much and found it deeply satisfying to perform.

Playing the Brahms First Symphony, he forgot, of necessity, that he was an administrator and a temporary fill-in and with a hand that had still not healed fully, and thought of nothing but the violin and the orchestra. That was Brahms for you. Although the first movement…I’m sorry, Herr Brahms, I know you spent twenty years thinking about it but it’s still juvenilia, Percy thought tolerantly, all your youthful emotions poured out and turned into music where they fell.

When they did this symphony at Hogwarts he’d been a third-year; Theodosius Rowle had been the leader, doing a workmanlike job with the second-movement solo. Percy had learned it just for fun, practicing it on his own; technically it was nothing any decent orchestral violinist couldn’t handle. He’d never performed it. Initially, at the Ministry orchestra, he’d felt bad about coming in as substitute leader and picking up this plum—surely Gartrett could do it, or Innes Merryweather or Patience Huang…? No, they said, jointly and severally, it’s all yours, enjoy it.

He didn’t. Unlike the first movement, it was the voice of the mature Brahms, and it sang too true. In rehearsal he took to playing it with the brisk accuracy copied from Rowle at school, keeping his mind determinedly elsewhere—on the process of the task force, on Cho (her eyes following his bow arm from the viola section), on how his hand ached (or sometimes did not), on—if all else failed—the intonation of the rest of the string section. He was always relieved when they could move on to the third movement, sweet and silly and nothing to Floo home about.

Most nights after rehearsal Percy walked home; the weather was growing colder, but it still seemed better for the violin’s fragile wood and catgut than the twisting in and out of Apparition, and it was the only time in his waking day when he found himself alone, taking deep breaths of the chill air and disentangling his mind. For the first few weeks after being cornered by Ran’s gang he had Apparated home from the office, landing unsteadily in his own front room, left hand throbbing bone-deep, his brain still caught up in work as if he had splinched himself mentally rather than physically. He rarely walked home again until he had joined the orchestra, still sometimes flinching at shadows even when his mind told him there was nothing to fear. Walking home with a briefcase alone, though, he had felt physically vulnerable even with his wand in his good hand; walking home with the violin on his back, he felt his flesh and bone as a bulwark of defense against any damage to the instrument.

 

And then there was one night when the finest dusting of snow sparkled where the streetlights caught it, and it was December, and the hearings for AIRY’s results were scheduled for the day whose evening would see the orchestra concert.

 

Percy had had to send home to the Burrow for his orchestra suit, not worn since he had left school. At Hogwarts he had added a red-and-gold Gryffindor tie, of course; now he had the more subdued dark green and copper of the Department of Magical Education. (He had overheard Dana Halley telling Cho, with great seriousness, that the Unspeakables wore invisible ties. Cho had looked as if she didn’t think she ought to believe him but couldn’t quite help herself.)

Backstage his hands shook, which he should have expected; it had happened before every concert at Hogwarts. It wouldn’t matter when he was playing. But he couldn’t help the tremor any more than the irregular quiver of pain in the left hand, so familiar now as to be almost comforting.

The other violinists were milling about as one did, newly recognized faces now unexpected again in dark suits and black dresses. Gilead Gartrett had Transfigured himself a folding chair and was sitting comfortably with his violin across his knees, looking as if he’d like to have a pipe to smoke. Katherine Tavenner’s hair, let down for the first time he had seen, fell clear to her knees.

The lights dimmed, the disorderly clumps of musicians formed somehow into a line and began to proceed onto the stage: Gartrett first, Percy at the last. Without looking at the audience, he turned inward and nodded to Aleks Dolohov, in the first oboe’s chair, for the A. By the time the orchestra had finished tuning, his hands were steady and pain no hindrance.

Levenstein’s baton went up, and the predawn hush of the first measures of the Helios Overture fell over the concert hall.

 

Earlier that day: Branwen’s clear voice (Percy had known her long enough now to realize that she had deliberately tuned her Welsh accent to a degree which, while unambiguously announcing her origins, would not sound unprofessional to English ears), buoyed up by the spell-enhanced acoustics of the Wizengamot hall. “My colleagues from Hogwarts have assured me that it is an unshakeable pillar of magical education in Britain. What our task force has discovered is twofold: that the doors of Hogwarts must be opened further to allow greater access for all young witches and wizards, not only those chosen as deserving by a system many centuries out of date, and that the magic of the Hogwarts system can only be strengthened by enhanced ties with others on the same island with whom we share our gifts.”

(Percy let his breath out, trying to keep his shoulders from moving visibly. All four of them had spent hours on that opening statement alone, struggling to find the precise wording that would reach the entrenched old ideas of the Wizengamot while maintaining the ideals which, at some point, the four of them had come to hold in common. Branwen had delivered it gloriously.)

 

Nielsen’s sunny day was at its zenith, and Percy needed all his attention now to keep up with the rapid fugue and keep the other string players together, precise as the sharp edges of shadows at noon.

 

His own voice picked up the thread, a little later, striving for the clarity and accuracy of the violin: “There are more young wizards and witches, who would gladly attend Hogwarts and yet are not permitted to, than we have ever considered. We, the Hogwarts-educated, do them the greatest disservice possible by considering them an underclass or worse. They and we offer one another, instead, a great opportunity.”

(“I should get to say that part!” Ran had argued. “You’re talking about me and my mates! Why can’t I be the one to say it?” “Because if he says it, it means the Establishment is on your side,” Branwen snapped back. “You’ll have your chance to speak. Don’t you worry.”)

 

Applause, shocking after the peaceful twilight of the last bars of the Overture. Drawn back to full awareness, Percy rose to his feet, drawing the rest of the orchestra with him, to acknowledge the audience’s response.

There would be no intermission; he sat down again as the applause began to fade. A few wind players shifted seats. Next to him, Gartrett drew the Brahms symphony part forward on their stand. Levenstein opened his big score—like many professional conductors, he used a paper score rather than a score-spell—and raised his baton. Percy braced himself to join in the crash of sound that would open the Brahms.

 

Ran took a breath so deep Percy worried for a moment that he might pass out; but when he spoke his voice, if a little higher than usual, sounded as if he were halfway through a debate in their office on any afternoon. “There’s some wizards and witches who need magical education, and deserve it, but can’t or won’t spend seven years in a castle in Scotland. We need more alternatives for a full magical training within communities around Britain.”

(Percy wanted to reach over right there and shake his hand, Ran’s brutal spell-casting grip on him four months before transformed.)

 

The second movement took its course, graceful and sad. Percy left the first violin part in the care of Gartrett and the others, took a breath, settled featherily down onto the high notes of his solo entrance and into the long first phrase, eloquent, straightforward. Many violinists liked to linger on the Romantic possibilities of the sixteenth notes and sextuplets that came after that; Percy had avoided doing so out of a distaste for scenery-chewing, and now found himself using his own precise, glass-clear style to make the phrase sing like what it was, a fractal of the original melody. The Classical clarity came out again with a half-twist, explaining itself effortlessly, in the Mozartian last phrase, a breath of Brahms’ reverence on the air; and the final solo triplets, the high G sharp that would ruin everything if the intonation was even a hair off, rose out of his bow and fingers with a tenderness that made him almost ashamed.

 

Cho spoke with the deep, unflashy confidence of her viola. “Not every witch or wizard in Britain needs a traditional British magical education. There are other, equally valid modalities of magical education, and our task is to recognize these and to learn from them while allowing them to learn from us.”

(“There speaks the voice of Ravenclaw,” Percy had said wryly. “Interested in everything.” But he still couldn’t stop looking at her.)

 

For all its technical simplicity, Percy was more conscious at the beginning of the fourth movement proper than anywhere else of his responsibility as leader: the strings must sound not like a group playing together but like a single, rich, resonant voice. He breathed in, felt forty-eight string players around him as close as a garment, and set his bow on the open G.

The finale picked up energy and excitement as it went, until they sailed through the coda and finished with a grand flourish, Brahms’ relief and triumph and joy at having finished his first great symphony, and finished well, filling the air. Percy found a handkerchief and wiped his forehead surreptitiously, cradled his left hand through a long reminiscent twinge while the applause gradually faded and the chorus poured onto stage for the last work of the evening.

 

The list of suggestions and requests and ideas went on for longer than, to be honest, he’d thought they would be permitted. Expand Hogwarts—not a great change at a blow, but a gradual shift. Open Hogwarts branches in London, in Manchester, in Bristol. Open other wizarding schools, like the country schools that had once been common, but with diplomas equal to Hogwarts in significance for employers. Magicovocational training, night school, weekend classes. Intercultural magical committees, shared experience programs for young wizards and witches from different educational backgrounds, more recognition, more communication, more opportunity. Their four voices braided like a string quartet.

The concluding remarks fell to Percy once more. As he had not done in any of his Ministry work since leaving school, he imagined the violin, the clean clear tone most compelling when it was allowed to tell only the truth. “We are not unaware of the sea change called for in the Initiative’s report, nor do we believe the decisions permitting it will be taken lightly. We have every confidence that the outlay of Galleons and time for which we call will be repaid tenfold, a hundredfold, with the growth and vitality of magic and the magical community in Britain. Thank you for your attention.”

 

The Schubert Magnificat was nine minutes of distilled joy and sweetness. “Why isn’t this performed more often?” Ambrose Marshall had demanded from the cello section in rehearsal.

“Because it’s addictive,” Levenstein shrugged. “Do it too often and you’d start feeling no concert was complete without it, and you can’t assemble all those singers _every_ time.” Marshall made a rueful face, but didn’t dispute the point.

Percy had to swallow hard more than once during the second movement, and again at the liquid melisma of the “Amens” in the last movement; but he had a job to do. The choir, underrehearsed or simply unable to resist Schubert’s exuberance, were rushing magnificently ahead with little regard for the initial tempo. Levenstein’s teeth flashed momentarily in his dark face as he tipped Percy a grin; rather than try to rein in fifty-odd exhilarated amateur singers, he was throwing his lot in with them. Percy made it his business to keep the orchestra with the conductor, never mind the tempo they’d actually rehearsed at, and they finished in closer to eight and a half minutes than nine, breathless and nearly laughing, to enthusiastic applause.

 

After the post-concert congratulations (Arthur and Molly were there as well as Cho’s mother and sister, plus even Branwen and Ran) and the initial cheerful clamor of the after-party, Percy and Cho found themselves gravitating to a quiet corner in the cavernous basement of Costa’s, the Greek pub and kebab house on Diagon Alley where the orchestra was wont to celebrate.

Cho brought her second Butterbeer with her, explaining self-consciously “Well…I’ll be in Korea in two weeks, they don’t have Butterbeer at all there…”

“Tomorrow’s a holiday,” Percy admitted magnanimously. In the same spirit, he had a tiny glass—pressed on him by Gilead Gartrett and Katherine Tavenner—of Firewhisky so pure it sparked even within the tumbler.

“My father’s there already, he’s been sending us _janggori mabo_ …I don’t know the English name for the spell, you use it when it’s too far to send an owl? He wanted me to go out when he did, but I told him I couldn’t come until after the task force hearings. But we’re to have a big family New Year’s there.”

Percy sipped his whisky and felt it flicker on his tongue. “Is that a difficult spell?”

“Not if you speak Korean,” Cho said cheerfully. She paused, picked up her Butterbeer bottle and set it down again. “I could send you one and you could try it?”

“Yes. If you would…yes, that might be a good plan,” Percy agreed. The whisky leapt in its glass and he realized he had picked it up with his bad hand.

Cho watched him set the glass down carefully. “You’ll keep me posted on how the project goes, then?”  
“Assuming it goes at all,” he said automatically. “We haven’t yet heard what the Wizengamot will decide…although I agree that the initial reaction was promising.”

“They’ll give us something, I bet. Even if not everything we asked for, not at first. And when they see how well it goes, they’ll give us more.”

“You sound like a Gryffindor,” Percy said wryly. “Do you know, Ran told me he wants to stay on and work for the project in some way?”

(Ran had come up to Percy in the corridor, planted his feet and folded his arms with all his old aggressiveness, and announced “I know you lot are going to throw me back when the task force finishes. I’m not going. I want a job, I’ve helped with all the work so far, I ought to have a job.”

Percy had too many younger brothers to be fazed. “Do you mean you want employment or you want to keep on working on the new education project?” he asked, knowing the answer.

Ran’s look of aggression turned shamefaced. “Both, all right?” he mumbled, breaking eye contact. “Except I can’t, right? I didn’t go to Hogwarts _and_ I haven’t even got, like, A-levels. You couldn’t hire me to do nothing, not for a real job.”

Percy had been thinking about this. “Most ex-Hogwarts wizards and witches have never invented their own spells, and you’ve spent years doing just that.” He watched the line of Ran’s shoulders. “It depends on what funding we get, of course—but—You work out what you want to do. Not just ‘I want a job,’ tell me what part of the project you want to work on, what day-to-day duties you want, what you should be in charge of. Then you figure out what actual qualifications you’d need—what you’d have to have _mastered_ doing. Then we work out how you get from A to B. You’re a pilot project, Ran. If you want it, that is.”

“If I _want_ it, he says like it was _easy_ ,” Ran scoffed, but he was starting to grin.)

“Not bad,” Cho said now, saluting Percy with the bottle of Butterbeer before taking a long pull. “Who knew a Gryffindor could have such an inventive mind?”

“It’s like today’s Schubert,” Percy shrugged, and they both giggled, recalling the wild ride of the last movement. “Sometimes you have to change the rules on the fly.”

“Are you going to stay in the orchestra even after Allegra comes back?” Cho asked.

Percy played for time with a long swallow of his Firewhisky, somewhat overestimated his capacity, and coughed violently. Cho offered him her Butterbeer, just barely not grinning; he waved it away, found a handkerchief, and wiped his eyes. “Sorry. I…yes…I expect I am.”

_I expect I am_ was a very mild way to put what might have been more specifically expressed as _I don’t know how I ever stopped doing this in the first place and I couldn’t give it up twice_. At some point in the last few months, between two bars of the Brahms fourth movement or among the endless running eighth notes of the Nielsen, Percy had noticed himself thinking—as if it were perfectly normal and sensical—that if not for his investment in their task force and its projects to come, he would have been turning in his notice at the Ministry and haunting auditions at orchestras around the country. Maybe someday. Not yet.

Cho seemed to have read his mind, perhaps far in advance. “You really do have two vocations,” she said a little wistfully. “I wouldn’t mind having at least one.”

“You will,” Percy assured her, feeling himself flush, and then stopped and thought. “Or not. It’s not a prerequisite of doing good work, and you do that, everywhere you are.”

Cho reached out suddenly and took his bad hand in hers, running a thumb over his violin calluses with such adroit gentleness that there would have been no pain even at a bad time. “The best compliment I’ve had all year,” she said, smiling at him.

Percy gripped her hand in response, and smiled back. “The best one I have to give.”

**Author's Note:**

> If anything seems inappropriate or mistaken, please let me know and I’ll do my best to amend it.
> 
> Extra points for anyone who recognizes the extremely obscure reference to “Hector Levenstein.”
> 
> All the music in the story is of course real, and highly recommended, although to the best of my knowledge Carl Nielsen was not a wizard. I wouldn’t bet money on Bartok, though.


End file.
